Josh Trank, who denounced 2015’s Fantastic Four amid a public dispute with 20th Century Fox, was dropped months earlier from a planned Boba Fett movie by Lucasfilm. Then the Cats trailer did. Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow was set to take the helm of Episode IX (known as The Rise of Skywalker) before his 2017 offbeat indie dramedy, The Book of Henry, opened to flabbergasted reviews. Cimino, who died in 2016, made sporadic small films over the next few decades but never returned to prominence. Entertainment Weekly is a registered trademark of Meredith Corporation All Rights Reserved. “Before the studio would greenlight the film, I had to prove that I had a plan,” he says. The "director jail" phenomenon is also known to disproportionally punish women and people of color. Looking for more? The first cast member he recruited was Taylor Swift; he invited her to screen some early test footage, and she immediately said yes to playing Bombalurina. The result is a lavish spectacle that Hooper hopes will feel just as magical as it did when he was a kid. Tom Hooper has seen your Cats memes. “I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal, and it was obviously much more of a big deal than I thought,” admits Hooper. When the first trailer dropped this summer and gave audiences their first look at Hooper’s feline-human hybrids, the reaction was visceral, to say the least. The King’s Speech also earned a best-actor Oscar for Colin Firth. Director Tom Hooper defends Cats The director opens up about his lifelong love of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical — and why he redesigned his feline stars after the first trailer response. Cats may be a cinematic crime for which there is no precedent—a surreal misfire, at once alienating, alarming, ... Tom Hooper seems destined for “director’s jail. “Action movies are supposed to be silly and over the top. I doubt it,” the source added. “We’d only finished shooting in March, so all the visual effects [in the trailer] were at quite an early stage,” he explains. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. In the 1990s and 2000s, diverse filmmakers who were finally making their breakthroughs also found themselves with few margin for error. 710067), Wonder Woman's Gal Gadot And Patty Jenkins Working On Cleopatra, John David Washington Joins David O Russell's Latest Film. Five years later, Trank is working on the Al Capone story Fonzo with Tom Hardy, and Trevorrow is returning to the land of dinosaurs with 2021’s Jurassic World 3. Reviews are generally in the negative. © 2020 Condé Nast. But there’s no safe place for the maker of the film: Tom Hooper seems destined for “director’s jail.”. “If he can make a little $20 million movie and attract a few big stars to it who will say, ‘There’s still a chance I could win an Oscar here'—if he promises there won’t be any songs or special effects—he could get one shot,” Rushfield said. Read more about Cats – the maddest, milkiest film of 2019 – in the new issue of Empire, on sale now. When the first trailer for the Cats movie arrived, the internet went berserk. Cats, man. That’s the loosely defined term for what happens when the film industry loses faith in a once-trusted auteur, who must find a way to rehabilitate their damaged reputation or remain in exile forever. Some recent headline-grabbing cases of "director jail" include two filmmakers who lost Star Wars films due to poor production and reception of other movies. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted to do something that was more performance-driven, the way The King’s Speech or The Danish Girl were,” said the source close to the filmmaker. “This was a face-plant, no question,” one high-level source at the studio told Vanity Fair. “I have yet to find somebody in this town who has delivered a best picture and big box office who doesn’t get rehired—other than Michael Cimino. So he decided to use visual effects, keeping the actors’ facial expressions while adding tails, whiskers, and fur. And that was because he shut a studio down,” said one source close to the Cats production. The film has raised questions about Hooper’s judgment. Hooper’s goal for the movie was to embrace the weirdness. “Even three years ago, when I described what I wanted to do, people said, ‘It’s not technically possible,’ ” he recalls. “Director’s jail used to be if you had really screwed up,” said Rushfield. joined with fellow African-American filmmakers, Eddie Murphy, Renée Zellweger, Jennifer Lopez & more. Tom Hooper directs a star-studded adaptation of the long-running Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Kate Winslet Starring In Virtual Ponzi Scheme Fake! He always takes his time and thinks about it.”, — Vanity Fair’s 2020 Hollywood cover is here with Eddie Murphy, Renée Zellweger, Jennifer Lopez & more— Who would defend Harvey Weinstein?— Oscar nominations 2020: what went wrong—and did anything go right?— Greta Gerwig on the lives of Little Women—and why “male violence” isn’t all that matters— Jennifer Lopez on giving her all to Hustlers and breaking the mold— How Antonio Banderas changed his life after nearly losing it— From the Archive: A look at the J. “Possibly there were, in the extremity in some of the responses, some clues in how to keep evolving [the production]. © Copyright 2020 Meredith Corporation. Even insiders within Universal agree there are mitigating factors that might lead to Hooper’s early release from director’s jail. Others had tried to herd Cats to the big screen before — Steven Spielberg abandoned an animated version in the ’90s — but Hooper says he’s been obsessed with the musical since childhood: “We got the audio­cassette, and I listened to it literally until the cassette wore out.”. Cats may be a cinematic crime for which there is no precedent—a surreal misfire, at once alienating, alarming, and delicious in a campy way, enflaming critics and moviegoers while simultaneously providing them with endless hours of cruel amusement. They were completely quiet… Read more “2 Lost Cats” To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. His representatives at ICM have been fielding offers, however, and two of them are said to be particularly appealing—one a project in development at a major studio, another a project that has two stars attached. “Often when I’m in the edit room working on the film, I recall why I liked it and try to honor that.” If only there were a good song about memory he could cue up. Another factor that works on Hooper’s behalf is that he didn’t war with the studio. “He can get hired, but is he going to come in the door with a passion project? Hooper says his biggest challenge was making those actors feel feline; he initially considered prosthetics like those used on stage, but limp tails and stationary ears fell flat. My guess is Tom Hooper will live to create another day, especially with the current demand for content.”. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. “If you were a ‘made man’ as a director, you had to have a lot of flops before people took notice. It helps when it’s a first offense, and the accused has a history of good behavior—like Hooper’s best-director Oscar for 2010’s The King’s Speech, which also won best picture. His imprisonment came amid epic budget and scheduling conflicts over the 1980 Western Heaven’s Gate, which tanked at the box office and led the parent company of United Artists to sell off the studio to MGM. “So it was quite entertaining. Talking to Empire in his first interview anywhere about the movie, director Tom Hooper claims that the explosive response caught him off guard. “I treasure the 10-year-old Tom’s reaction,” he says. The truly devastating thing about Cats, though, is not that people didn’t go to see it—it’s that it became an object of ridicule. Lo phenomenon. Seth Grahame-Smith Writing The Green Lantern Series For HBO, Empire Podcast #435: Miranda July, Rose Glass And Morfydd Clark. “With filmmakers at Tom’s level, with the kind of body of work he has, there are so many of these guys who have had movies that haven’t connected financially, or critically, and it’s far from a defining moment,” the source said. “I really concentrated on bringing back the actors’ faces because when you’ve got Ian McKellen or Judi Dench or Taylor Swift, why would you not want to? Still, Hooper says he’s “actually quite grateful” for the response: After the trailer’s release, he used some of the feedback to redesign “every single cat to some extent, whether small or large.”, His biggest takeaway was emphasizing the more human features in each cat’s face. This month’s magazine comes with a bonus Skywalker Saga magazine celebrating the full nine-film Star Wars saga, plus an exclusive Dark Rey art card illustrated by Rory Kurtz. “I think probably my original dream to use a lot of the human face had gotten perhaps a bit lost in that process of rushing to make that first trailer,” he explains. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Eliot’s poetry to a new generation, with newcomer Francesca Hayward playing the small fluffy protagonist, Victoria. Hooper, who was also a producer and co-writer of Cats, was traveling and was unavailable for comment, but a source close to him said that the filmmaker hasn’t signed for his next project. As Hollywood prepares to select its best picture of the year at the Academy Awards, what will be the consequence for crafting arguably the biggest fiasco? A week my 2 indoor only cats got out through a broken window screen. “I don’t think anybody is going to be putting a $100 million budget in front of him now, but he’s still the director of The King’s Speech,” said veteran journalist Richard Rushfield, impresario of the Hollywood newsletter the Ankler and author of the definitive article “The Rules of Director Jail.”. The response to the trailer was a lot of confusion. Underwhelming, for sure, but not a capital offense compared to other big-budget gambles. “I was just so fascinated because I didn’t think it was controversial at all,” he says.

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